With so much fanart and speculation bouncing around the internet, it would always have been difficult to make such a big, bombastic, multi-pouched character as Cable feel as imposing on the big screen as he is in comics and illustrations.

Rob Liefeld's signature design of a man whose pecks are bigger than his head just isn't going to translate perfectly to the big screen with a genuine, human actor - as you can see in the first official images of the mutant's Deadpool 2 appearance, revealed in standard fashion through Ryan Reynolds' Twitter.

Perhaps for that reason, as exciting as it is to finally get a look at Josh Brolin as Cable, it stands out less than the first glimpse of Zazie Beetz as Domino that we got last week:

This isn't to say that the costume doesn't look amazing - Brolin's appearance here is spot on, from the scars across his eye to all his fun cybernetic parts. The full costume, shown below, even accounts for the many, many pouches that Liefeld likes to draw on any and all of his characters (and which no doubt work wonders for cosplayers who always have spare pockets to keep snacks in).

Sure, this version of Cable is only wearing a T-shirt, instead of a fancy colorful X-Men costume that's covered in body armor, as is usually his thing, but this probably reflects the direction that Reynolds and director David Leitch are taking with this film - it seems likely that Cable and Domino will be a pair of mercenaries without any specific ties to the X-Men, and this makes sense considering that Fox's movies haven't yet really dealt with the idea of morally ambiguous X-Men.

Thus far in the movies, the X-Men have been unabashedly heroic (no matter how much Wolverine grumbles about it), while any mutant who isn't a member of Xavier's team of heroes is generally suspicious at best, and a potential threat at worst (for examples, see Magneto, Mystique, Sebastian Shaw, Colonel Stryker's son, Emma Frost, Sabertooth, Deadpool, Deadpool again, Apocalypse, Psylocke, and Silverfox).

Putting Cable in subdued, simple clothing not only contrasts his cyborg appearance, but helps to identify him as an unknown entity within the film - we don't know where his allegiances lie, and his lack of a goofy X-themed, comic book accurate costume implies that he's probably not going to have ties to his goodie-two-shoes father Cyclops.

The X-Force movie will give us a team of mutant "heroes" who are willing to do dirty things, and Deadpool 2 is going to lead the way to this. The inclusion of Cable and Domino as mercenaries helps to show that, like Deadpool himself, this movie world is a little murkier than the standard line of X-Men films have been up to this point. Colossus and Negasonic Teenage Warhead serve as our window into the heroic side of this universe, while the two new antiheroes will help us see more of the dark underbelly that's at play.

So having a look at these first images of Cable in Deadpool 2, there is a reason why he's not sparkling with more comic book visual goodness. For one thing it wouldn't fit the movie, and for another thing, it's physically impossible for any human being to look even close to Cable's ridiculous comic book appearance.

Or, to quote Mike Lawrence:

Cable in a movie was never going to look exactly like how he does in the comics because Rob Liefeld doesn't know how to draw real people.